Thinking Clearly About Our African Spritual Heritage

When we look and think clearly about Ham, and see where Ham’s sons settled, we can tell that his sons were people of color because they settled in Africa and the Middle east. Now Ham’s son Canaan settled in the middle east. This means we as people of color were the first ones to get into the promised land, and then we blew it because of our disobedience to God.

In lift every voice and sing, there is a prophetic warning. It says shadowed beneath thy hand, may we forever stand true to our God and true to our native land. Lest our feet stray from the places our God where met thee, lest our hearts, drunk with the wine of the world we forget thee. God opened the door for us to enter part of the promised land that Dr. King saw in his mountaintop experience, but in our rejection of God and our history, many of us are worse off than before the civil rights era. Not because of lack of opportunity, but because of a chosen path of self destruction. Our forgetting where we came from is costing us some of the promised land just as the people of Canaan lost their blessing because of disobedience.

We have come from people who have done some awesome things. We’ve heard all month in our black history moments what we have done. We need to remember that so that we will not make excuses for our behaviors. I can remember whenever we went somewhere, our grandmother would say, " remember where you come from." It was her way of saying, "don’t you do anything to bring shame and disgrace to the family." We accepted it back then, that we did have a responsibility for the good name of the family. Now, it’s everybody do what they want to do. Like in the book of Judges, "everybody did what was right in their own eyes." In the process 11 tribes almost completely killed all the members of the tribe of Benjamin.

Our African spiritual heritage is not simply the heritage of a people in bondage. Slavery was a part of our history, but our history goes back far greater than that. As descendants of Ham, our ancestors were among the first to find great civilizations.

Put founded Libya in Africa, Mizraim founded Egypt in Africa, and Cush found the Sudan in Africa. The Bible just told us in the very beginning it was Black people who first settled in northern Africa. It does not take much to figure out, that they must have been the ones to have built the great sphinx. It’s the figure with a lion’s body and a human head and its huge, but its nose is missing. The nose didn’t fall off by accident. It was blown off by people who didn’t have large noses. Do you know why? People didn’t want to see that black nose on this magnifent work of art, because they would have to admit that blacks built it. They wanted us to forget the greatness we had known as a people by making it look less Black.

Most blacks in the Old Testament are referred to as Cushites. For years when we have thought of African warriors, we remembered those stupid Tarzan movies in which we had a flimsy bow and arrow, a spear that was about to break, and a bone between our nose. Tarzan and Cheetah would knock twenty-five of us with one swing on the rope. Yet that’s not what the Bible says about Africans.